Akbari: Writing, Speech, Dialogue, and 'Word Art' in a Global Context.

This presentation will follow the thread of platonic concepts of spoken and written language, including the form of the dialogue, with particular emphasis on twelfth-century neoplatonic accounts of scientific and philosophical knowledge. Juxtaposing these with the epistemologies of present-day Indigenous writers including the late Lee Maracle (Sto:lo) and Sylvia McAdam Saysewahum (Cree) enables the emergence of new, shared questions regarding the respective roles of writing and speech, as well as individual and collective knowledge. 

Chemla and Netz: Is there a global history of mathematics?

This will be a conversation  and friendly debate on the question of the title in conjunction with reflections on the contrary proposition that global history is the only kind of history that is genuinely coherent. 

Irving: Transitory Sounds in Global Music History and Academic Attempts to Recover Them

When scholars study the phenomenon of “humanly organised sound” (a term coined by ethnomusicologist and anthropologist John Blacking to refer to diverse kinds of music) they are faced with a triad of sources: the testimonies of today’s musicians and their observable practices; audio and video recordings; and material or textual items that relate to musical phenomena in the past or present. Global Music Historians use all these data to study how human communities around the world make music, or how they have become connected to one another through globalising processes. Yet there is a significant point of transition in the history of the relationship between humans and their “organised sounds” across the longue durée: the advent of sound-recording technology in 1877. This presentation explores the many ways in which scholars approach the study of musics that were globally interconnected before the age of sound recording – through migration, trade, colonialism, or religion – and the epistemological and ontological challenges that arise.

Jarzombek: Sri Lanka and the Birth of the Global Dark Matter Economy

Local and long-distance trade have been the connective tissue between societies since our most ancient times. What traveled farthest was mostly high-end, lightweight materials such as gems and incense. Beginning around 100 BCE and escalating in the following centuries, we see the emergence of bulk economies in such luxury commodities. Sri Lanka was one of the first actors in this. It exported huge amounts of rubies (the world’s primary source at the time), cinnamon (particularly valued in India and Rome), and pearls (particularly valued in China). Because this trade was done almost entirely through personal, oral relations, we have few documents apart from ledgers at ports in China and elsewhere. But what did the Sri Lankans want in exchange? How and where did these exchanges take place? And how was this wealth reflected in Sri Lanka's architecture? This lecture will look at the give-and-take and discuss how the Dark Matter Economy of Sri Lanka turbo-charged the larger oceanic trade economy that was so important in the increasingly interconnected world of the first millennium CE.